Playing games with gambling rooms

Published 10:30 pm, Sunday, September 18, 2011

Earlier this month, Houston City Council voted to triple the annual fees that game rooms pay for their licenses.

Yes, you read that right: The city licenses the hundreds of game rooms here - the vast majority of which, everyone knows, are illegal gambling joints. The city also regulates them, issuing permit stickers for "eight-liner" gambling machines and requiring signs that label the places as game rooms.

What's next, you wonder, in this bizarro world of city-regulated vice? Licenses to sell stolen hubcaps? Permits for prostitutes?

But really, the problem doesn't lie with the city. It lies in Texas gambling law, which has been a hot mess for nearly two decades. In 1993, to accommodate kiddie joints like Chuck E. Cheese's, state legislators tinkered with the law, allowing "amusement" machines to award noncash prizes. "The fuzzy animal amendment," they called it. But the results weren't cute.

Though gambling was illegal, gambling machines were not. The only difference between a gambling machine and an amusement machine is how much its payout is worth - and it's easy, when cops visit, to claim that tokens are worth no more than the $5 limit.

The situation frustrates the police; it takes them an astonishing amount of time to make a solid case that gambling is occurring in a place that's jam-packed with gambling machines. And when they do manage to make a bust, the criminal penalties are light - for the owners, just a cost of doing business.

Those whacked-out state laws leave cities two options: to tie themselves in knots regulating game rooms; or to pretend that the game rooms don't exist. We're glad Houston doesn't pretend.

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We support Councilmember Wanda Adams' effort to see that game-room licensing fees at least cover the city's regulatory costs. And we agree, too, with Mayor Annise Parker: The Texas Legislature needs to fix the problem.

Legalization would at least generate taxes, though we'd prefer the state make it possible for cities to shut it down. The current law gives us the worst of both worlds - and what's the payout in that?